


I Hope I Helped

by BloodMagic



Series: Dragon Age: Fluff [3]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Fluff without Plot, Friendship, Gen, Light Angst, Post-Canon, Solavellan mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-31
Updated: 2015-03-31
Packaged: 2018-03-20 13:14:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3651696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BloodMagic/pseuds/BloodMagic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(Short-term post-canon, same ship as Before The Dawn pts 1& 2 [Cullen/Narvi Lavellan] but about a year before those take place -- ie, they're not a 'ship' yet; they're a set of blueprints for maybe a kayak.)</p><p>Cullen is having a bad day. Cole notices his pain and tries to help with a simple act of compassion.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Hope I Helped

It wasn't like Cullen to sit down during the day – even his designated desk chair had books and papers on it more often than his own backside – but after a particularly bad night's sleep and a punishing sparring session with one of his captains, the commander was feeling like a few minutes on a bench in the tavern with a small drink and a hearty late lunch was just the answer to his problems.

Except that he was barely touching either drink or lunch and though his feet felt relieved, his mind did not. His dreams were getting worse the longer he stayed off lyrium. And not just 'worse' as in 'more vivid', though they were; no, it was much more insidious than that. Before, it was common for him to dream about his memories from Kinloch Hold, or from the Kirkwall Gallows. He would see, over and over again, scenes of his fellow templars cut down and tortured by blood mages and demons alike. That was bad enough, but there was one small mercy in that over time their faces and voices became distorted enough that for Cullen it was more like dreaming about some random templar instead of a specific friend.

That mercy no longer existed to protect him, for now in his dreams instead of “random” templars he saw them wearing the faces of his current friends, his own recruits, Leliana's spies and scouts. They were no longer nameless shadows of old acquaintances; now it was Cassandra he saw screaming under a rage demon's brand, Rylen with a deep gash running across his back from shoulder to hip with a blood mage's cruel hand on his shoulder.

It was Narvi locked in a plain stone chamber with scratches in the walls where previous inhabitants had tried to claw their way out. She would be doing the same, but for the desire demon that held her mind in check. It was wearing Solas's face, almost identical if not for its being distorted by a hungry, salacious grin that defied mortal musculature. The real Solas lay bloodied but not quite dead in a corner of the chamber. He was crying out for Narvi to resist the demon but she didn't hear or notice him; her mind was gone, completely in thrall to the demon.

Cullen had gotten good at waking himself up from nightmares when they became too intense; he usually managed to force himself awake before Narvi transformed into an abomination, but not always. Last night was one such 'not always' night.

Maker save him, but he could not bear the thought of her falling to any demon. Somewhere in his rational mind he knew that if it ever happened – she _was_ a mage after all, and one in a position of considerable power, an attractive target for a demon of pride – he would have to strike her down, and he might be the only one who could do it. It would only kill him to go through with it though. Never mind that if he _did_ strike her down, there would be no one left in the world to seal the rifts in the Fade, and they would eventually rip apart all of Thedas. No big deal there.

“You seem... sharper than usual,” Cullen heard a confused voice say off to his right. He looked and started.

“Maker's breath! Cole, I didn't know you were there,” he exclaimed when he saw who had spoken. He hadn't seen Cole at all in weeks; he wasn't sure how to treat the boy's sudden appearance.

“That's alright,” the young man answered. He sat down next to Cullen and seemed to be staring at the commander's ear. “You're hurting,” he finally said. “Can I help?”

Cullen had no idea how to answer that. He was still wary of Cole. Narvi and Varric had assured him that Cole was much closer to human now than he was to a spirit, and maybe it was old templar prejudice more than justified mistrust, but Cullen was still uncomfortable around him.

Still, he had seen the boy hard at work, helping the people of the Inquisition. Cole's thinking wasn't as linear as Cullen might have liked, but his heart was in the right place, and compassion was sometimes better suited to this sort of task than logic anyway.

“I don't suppose you know a cure for bad dreams?” the commander finally asked.

Cole shook his head. “That's not what's hurting you. Not really.”

Cullen's brows furrowed and he bade the boy continue.

“You're trying to get the singing out of your veins, but it won't come out. It swells and sticks, like a sore but you can't cut it open. It takes the bad dreams, the bad memories of bad days, and it makes them worse. And it hurts, you want it to stop. If you can get the singing back, it might be loud enough to drown out the sound of the memories.”

Cullen just stared for a moment. Was Cole truly reading his thoughts? He hadn't shared his feelings about this with anyone. Even Cassandra and Narvi, the two people in whom he had most confided on these matters, knew only as little as they had to to make informed decisions should his condition worsen.

“How do you know all that?” Cullen gave in and asked.

“It's what you're feeling isn't it?” came the evasive reply.

Cullen looked away and down, at the plate of barely eaten food.

Cole was silent for a few seconds, but then tried a different tack.

“Do you know what a friend is?” he asked, quite suddenly as far as Cullen was concerned.

“Do you?” the commander returned, his tone more clipped than he intended. It had been a long, miserable day and he felt incapable of following any logic that was too roundabout.

“I was confused, when I became more real, it made me turn the word friend and look at it again. I was confused, so I asked Narvi what she thought a friend was. She said to me 'friends are people who believe in each other.'”

“She's a wise woman,” Cullen offered cautiously. He always had to be careful what he said about her around other people. It was not his place to express as much admiration for her as he felt, unless he could couch it in purely professional terms. The Inquisition had given up almost all hope of finding Solas, and he seemed to be out of her life for good, but that meant little in the end. Even if Cullen had the courage to admit what he felt for her, now was not the time. Narvi's combined love and anger burned her still and weighed heavily on her mind even if she never admitted it aloud. He would not take advantage of her pain.

“She believed in me even when I wasn't as much of a person as I am now. She kept believing in me while I was learning about being _more_ like a person. Narvi is... my friend. Narvi helped me, so I could learn how to help more people the way a person would do it. Cullen, you're a good templar who likes protecting and doesn't like to hurt. I want to be your friend, I want to believe in you like she believed in me.”

Well. That was a direction the good commander was not expecting. “I—thank you, Cole,” was all he could say. His throat sounded choked up on his emotion.

Cole smiled an awkward sort of smile. He was still learning the intricacies of how facial expressions could sometimes serve as well as words. “I believe in you, you can get your blood clean again, so it can stop hurting you. I believe that you can climb up over it if you keep trying.”

They sat there in stunned silence for a moment. For all his oddities, Cole truly had a good heart, Cullen decided. If he was being honest with himself, knowing that he wasn't completely alone, knowing that someone _did_ believe in him... it was comforting. And it reminded him that Cole was not the only one.

Cassandra believed in him, too. That's why she refused to recommend a replacement, refused to let him step down as commander. She, like Cole, believed he was capable of working through it.

Narvi believed in him. At the time she had taken a hard stance, had ordered him point-blank not to take lyrium. A tiny part of him that wanted to fall back on easy habits used to resent her for giving him that order, but now he saw her motivation, and he had come to appreciate that her military tone was exactly what he needed to hear to compel his obedience. Cullen was a good soldier who obeyed orders from his officers. So that 'officer' was a foot shorter than him and just over half his weight, not to mention the very sort of mage he used to police; she was still his Inquisitor, and she laid down the law. Staying off lyrium was hard, but _wanting_ to stay off lyrium was easy when it was a rule to be followed.

“You're brighter and softer now,” Cole interrupted his thoughts. “You're always brighter and softer when you think about her. She helps you with only her memories. I wish I could help like that.” Cullen's brows shot up and he coughed to cover his embarassment. He tried to think of a way to ease both of their minds.

“Believe me, Cole, someday when today is a memory I will look back on it and you will be able to help like that,” Cullen assured him. He couldn't see the future, but it was probably true.

“I hope I remember it too,” Cole answered wistfully. “Being more like a person means I can remember more things. I want to remember today. I learned today that memories can help people. Remembering her helps you, just like remembering you helps her. It's important to keep good memories to help during bad times.”

Cullen's attention caught on one particular sentence. “She thinks about me and it—it helps her?” he asked. He was trying to keep the hopeful upturned inflection out of his voice. No doubt Cole could sense it anyway even if he couldn't hear it.

“Yes.” Cullen and Cole stared at each other for a few seconds before Cole seemed to catch on. “You want to know how? It's like... for her, you are a song. Not a real song she hears with her ears, and not like the lyrium song you feel in your blood, but a song she feels in her soul. Sometimes her soul is like a string, stretched out tight, taut, thin, pulled between what she is and what she wants to be. Most people for her are just a noise that moves the string a little but there's no balance and it's discord. Your life is a song: it moves the string with a rhythm. It vibrates, vibrant, vivid, with colors that don't have names. She moves with it, but it doesn't hurt.”

“That... only barely makes any sense, Cole.” Cullen was having such a hard time trying to follow the visual pattern of Cole's words that he missed most of the nuance of his meaning.

“It means that something in you understands something in her in a way that neither of you can explain, so I explain it with a song and a string,” Cole simplified. His tone had a slight edge of impatience, something Cullen had never heard in it before the adventure in which the spirit-boy had become more human. Then again, the two had not spent much time in each others' company before that adventure, so perhaps Cullen was just missing out on too much history to make an educated comparison.

But it also means another thing,” Cole was continuing, almost oblivious to whether or not Cullen was even still listening. He was, once he pulled his mind out of his previous thought track. “It means she's afraid of you.”

“Of me? Why?” Narvi knew Cullen would never hurt her, right? Surely she had to know that. Waiting for Cole to explain _this_ was almost physically painful, but maybe that was just the way he was clenching his fist under the table.

“She's afraid of letting you close enough for your song to sing too loud. She thinks if it's too loud or too much then she'll break. But if it's too quiet then the string won't move at all, and that's too lonely.”

It was difficult to work through all the metaphors, but Cullen was pretty sure the takeaway was that Narvi went to great effort to keep their relationship in a balance; neither too close nor too distant. He had noticed that such a balance existed between them, but he had never thought to attribute it to deliberate action on her part.

“Is there anything I can do to help her?” Cullen finally asked. His voice sounded defeated; he suspected that Cole would have no answer.

In fact, Cole did have an answer, but it was probably not one the commander wanted to hear. “Help her by being you. Your song sings to her just by being who you are, you don't have to try to do anything different.”

“So there's nothing I can do?”

“You can't change your song, Cullen.” Cole seemed confused that he had to explain this at all. “It's in everything you do. Even if you stand alone in an empty room, the way you breathe and how your eyes move is part of it.”

“How do I keep her from snapping if it's too much?” Cullen had no idea what that actually meant in literal terms, but he felt like using Cole's own language might get a straighter answer out of him.

Cole shrugged. “No one knows if that _can_ happen. But she is strong. Her fear limits her more than her abilities ever could.”

“I see.”

“I hope I helped.” He sounded so hopeful. Cullen offered the young man a smile.

“You did. Thank you,” the commander said gently. Cole's eyes lit up in response. Somehow, Cullen got the feeling that those words were a form of help unto themselves. It occurred to him then that the more human Cole became, the more he would find himself in need of some 'help' of his own, even if it was a few simple words and a smile.

Cole got up and left a few moments later. He said he wanted to scatter some bread for the little birds that were nesting in the stables. Cullen went back to his late lunch and found that his mind was at ease enough to enjoy it. That was a luxury he had not experienced in weeks at least. The ex-templar commander might have stopped to wonder if there was something magical in Cole's surprisingly effective 'helping' techniques, but for the moment that seemed unimportant. Maybe it really was just the power of compassion and empathy. That was enough for him for now.

 


End file.
